Music PhD candidate Samuel T. Nemeth recently gave a colloquium talk for the Pennsylvania State University Musicology and Music Theory Program. Nemeth’s presentation, “Battle of the Bands: Adolphe Sax’s Sonic Fusillades and the Military Politics of Timbral Homogeneity,” examined the Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax’s brass instrument inventions and their connection to French artillery and long-barreled firearms of the 1840s and 1850s.
Nemeth suggests Sax’s instruments provided audibility outdoors, high volume levels, and timbral homogeneity, delivering a massed core of sound—a tight grouping of “musical bullets”—with a high degree of accuracy.